News

Hello, dear readers. I am back from a long and lovely stay in Seattle, where I spoke to so many different groups that I nearly lost my voice. I didn’t take my laptop with me, and instead spent my free time resting and reading. I enjoyed Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s debut novel, Wench, which is set in a resort that catered to Southern gentlemen and their slave mistresses in 1850s Ohio. It’s beautifully written and it kept me up at night. I also loved Toni Morrison’s A Mercy; I don’t know why it took me so long to get to this one, but I’m glad I did. It’s a fascinating little book, challenging at times, and it has the curious effect of making you want to immediately start reading it again the minute you reach the end. Since getting back, I’ve been working around the clock on my new novel and so I haven’t had any time at all to read blogs or to write on mine. My silence here is, I hope, the good kind of silence, the silence of work, designed to prevent the more dangerous kind of silence(s) that Tillie Olsen once wrote about.

As I may have mentioned, my novel, Secret Son, was selected for a “One City, One Book” program in Seattle. I’ll be in town for a week, from May 6th to May 10th, to give readings and Q&A events. Here are all the details:

May 6, 2010
11:00 AM
Q & A
Seattle Reads Event
Northgate Community Center
10510 5th Ave NE
Seattle, Washington

May 6, 2010
7:00 PM
Q & A
Seattle Reads Event
Seattle Public Library – Douglass-Truth Branch
2300 E. Yesler Way
Seattle, Washington

May 7, 2010
7:00 PM
An evening with Laila Lalami
Seattle Reads Event
Seattle Public Library – Central Library
1000 Fourth Ave.
Seattle, Washington

May 8, 2010
11:00 AM
Q & A
Seattle Reads Event
Seattle Public Library – North East Branch
6801 35th Ave. N.E.
Seattle, Washington

May 8, 2010
4:00 PM
Q & A
Seattle Reads Event
Seattle Public Library – Beacon Hill Branch
2821 Beacon Ave. S.
Seattle, Washington

I will also be delivering a lecture as part of the Seattle Arts & Lecture series at Benaroya Hall. This is a ticketed event and you can purchase tickets here:

May 10, 2010
7:30 PM
Seattle Arts & Lectures
Benaroya Hall
Seattle, Washington

That’s about it. I hope to see you there!

Here is a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian—it’s a sentence, actually, a long, wonderfully crafted sentence, whose beauty highlights the very ugliness of what is about to happen when a group of Indians catches up with a band of American scalp hunters:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

I heard recently that a film adaptation of the novel is in the works. I’ve always thought this book was unfilmable, but perhaps Todd Field (who has directed good adaptations of In the Bedroom and Little Children) is up to the task.

Thank you to all those who came to my L.A. Times Festival of Books panel this weekend. I hope you all had as much fun as I did. And thanks especially to Maret Orliss, Vanessa Curwen, and Ann Binney for organizing this huge festival–I have no idea how they do it every year! (Above is a picture of me with a few friends who were also in attendance.)